Scare us, repulse us, just don't ever lecture us

'Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, and anyone who stays does!' Thus spake Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke 10 years ago when it was suggested that the most 'morally appropriate' response to his excruciating German-language film Funny Games was to walk out. Haneke garnered international acclaim in 2005 for his intense, enigmatic hit thriller, Hidden. 1997's Funny Games was far less accessible. A self-consciously self-reflexive tale in which a bourgeois family are held hostage and tortured for the 'entertainment' (or education) of its increasingly culpable audience, the film was designed to be an unendurable slap in the face for those in search of cheap, painless screen-violence thrills. 'Please leave now!' a character pleads early on, and the rest of the film plays out as a shrieking challenge to its audience to do just that, as two urbane psychos in tennis-whites nod and wink at the camera while hideously despatching their captives for our pleasure. As a die-hard horror fan who's spent many happy hours enjoying gratuitous screen carnage, watching Funny Games at its 1997 Cannes premiere was like being told off for two hours. By an Austrian. In France. Aarrgh!

The problem with the original Funny Games was that its target audience (dumbo consumers of the violent American cinema that Haneke professes to despise) were never going to watch a German-language arthouse movie specifically designed to make them feel lousy. So, with peculiarly humourless European logic, Haneke has remade the film, virtually shot-for-shot, but this time in English. 'The first version, unfortunately didn't get seen by its intended audience,' Haneke explains, 'because it was in German, so I thought this would be a good opportunity for it to reach the audience it was originally made for. That is the only reason.'

Perhaps predictably, the response from critics in America has not been warm and welcoming. In an article entitled 'A Vicious Attack on Innocent People, on Screen and in the Theatre', AO Scott calls the film a fraud, brands Haneke a sadist, and accuses Funny Games of feeding the appetite for the 'pornography of blood and pain' typical of Eli Roth's rubbish Hostel pics. David Edelstein follows suit, reporting that he cut up his DVD copy of the original Funny Games ('unclean!') before describing the remake as 'little more than high-toned torture porn with an edge of righteousness'. In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane summed up the feelings of many of his colleagues by concluding that 'we don't feel nearly as chastened or ashamed as Haneke would like. We feel patronised.'

Such responses are nothing new. Reviewing the original film back in the Nineties I noted that 'rarely has a film-maker exercised such perverse precision in his desire to torment an audience for whom he clearly harbours unbridled contempt'. It is this contempt, rather than any imagined language barrier, which makes Funny Games such an unappealing proposition. Being scared can be fun. So can being repulsed - up to a point. But being stiffly lectured on why you are such a bad person for wanting to watch any of this stuff in the first place gets a bit wearing. After all, who wants to pay to see a film whose creator apparently hates them for paying to see his film? It makes little difference whether Haneke is hectoring you in English or German - the sanctimonious tone loses nothing in translation .

Worse still, any sleazeball horror fan familiar with John McNaughton's seminal 1980s gem Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (a gruelling nightmare which Haneke hilariously dismissed as 'too comical') will have seen Haneke's themes - the voyeuristic power of video, the collusion of viewer and killer - rehearsed several years earlier in altogether more radical fashion. Funny Games may pride itself on denying the audience the cathartic spectacle of violence, but Haneke's reliance on anguished screams rather than visceral visuals (hear everything, show nothing) merely builds on Tobe Hooper's more experimental Texas Chain Saw Massacre which did far more to unravel the conventions of the genre back in the early Seventies. Even the walk-out argument is old hat - Wes Craven once told me that although he hated state censorship, he applauded the audience members who had tried to break into the projection booth to cut up the print of his arthouse/grindhouse hybrid Last House on the Left

Indeed, Haneke himself had covered much of this ground before in more palatably shocking fashion in films like 1992's Benny's Video. And in the decade since the release of Funny Games, he has grown into an altogether more accomplished film-maker, eschewing the snotty-nosed academic piety of yore in favour of a more dramatically rewarding humanity. After accomplished adult fare such as The Piano Teacher and Hidden, revisiting the postgraduate postmodern gimmicks of Funny Games (Look, it's a movie! Watch, I can rewind it!) seems at best regressive, while remaking a foreign-language cause célèbre in English just smacks of selling out.

So does Haneke's American experiment really deserve to be treated as cruelly as some Stateside critics think? Well, not entirely. Like the original, you can't fault the clinical cruelty of Funny Games U.S., nor the dexterity with which Haneke constantly cranks up the pain while skilfully denying his audiences the cathartic spectacle of violence. Technically, it's extremely well executed, although Hollywood stars Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt lack the raw edge of their European predecessors Susanne Lothar and Arno Frisch. And for me, there was a perverse masochistic pleasure in enduring the damn thing all over again, just to remind myself how cross it made me the first time round.